On The Plain Of Snakes: A Mexican Journey

by Paul Theroux

where centuries of wealth and power have formed thick layers over the surface of what’s really going on.”

But the term “magical realism” is an academic justification—that is, a pompous way of avoiding the term “fantasy.” It is a literature of denial, a literature of hokum, a form of extravagant literary nostalgia for an earlier, animistic era, a culture of masks, sacrifices, apparitions, and fairy tales.